The directors of I Declare War - a film in which an innocent game of ‘capture
the flag’ turns serious – think Hollywood has forgotten what being a teenage
boy is really like

In I Declare War, a Canadian film released in the UK this week, a group of 13-year-old boys go into the woods to play war.

They start off fighting with sticks and water balloons, but these soon turn into bayonets and grenades as we begin to see the conflict through the boys’ eyes – while the game loses its innocence and old friends turn on each other.

The actors are the same age as the characters they play, but the language and themes are adult, earning the film comparisons with the 1986 coming-of-age movie Stand By Meand Lord of the Flies, the daddy of the boys-running-amok genre.

“I wanted to tell a story about what it actually feels like to be a kid,” says Jason Lapeyre, who wrote the film and directed it along with Robert Wilson. “It was very frustrating for me as a movie-goer because I felt like I didn’t see real kids on screen very often, whereas when I was younger, with films like The Goonies, I saw that quite a lot.

“Kids never say f--- in movies, but they do in real life. I thought that was wrong.”

His co-director Wilson adds: “We wanted it to feel as intense as a war film, because you feel things so much more intensely; at that age, everything’s a matter of life and death.”

Though the dialogue has been updated to reflect contemporary slang, the Toronto-based directors, now both 40, say the film is in large part based on their own childhoods. It was shot over 20 days in the woods where Wilson used to play as a boy.

“These are universal themes, from books like Lord of the Flies to our own childhoods,” Lapeyre says. “It’s what coming of age is all about – it’s about taking these wild, confusing impulses and trying to tame them. That’s the process of maturing, trying to find a way to fit into society.”

There is one tomboyish female character in the film, but both directors knew from the outset this had to be a male-dominated group.

“It’s a boy thing,” says Wilson. “It’s not just 13-year-olds, I’ve got a two-year-old boy who is already pushing boundaries and breaking rules like they don’t matter to him.

“We have a girl as well, and my wife and I tried to be fairly gender neutral in their upbringing – because that’s the buzzword nowadays and we’re suckers for that kind of thing. But I tell you, the boy will climb himself into a metal box in three seconds flat just to see if he can, and the girl will want to hold your hand while she’s walking down the street.

“Nobody wants to believe that there’s a difference between boys and girls, but you come over to mine any day and you’ll see it.”

Without wanting to give too much away, I Declare War has a downbeat ending that appears to question the ties of childhood friendships. Why did they choose to do this?

“It wouldn’t have been very genuine to have a message slammed on at the end,” says Wilson, who, like Lapeyre, is now working on other projects with less of a teenage focus. “Maybe it’s a bleak ending or maybe tomorrow’s just another day.”